122: KATHY RYAN, Portrait of Jason < I Want to Know All of You: The Art & Collection of Jason Polan, 3 May 2024 < Auctions

I Want to Know All of You

The Art & Collection of Jason Polan

As someone who circulated freely through the urban environment of New York City, Jason Polan’s work as an artist was intimately connected to experiencing all that the metropolis had to offer—and fondly, sometimes obsessively, cataloging its ceaseless variety. Polan moved to New York in 2005 and passed away at the start of 2020. Because his time there spanned the post-9/11 to pre-COVID era, he absorbed the city during the slow reconstruction of lower Manhattan, amid the shock of the Great Recession of 2008, and prior to the dramatic shutdown brought on by the global pandemic.

Both ambition and optimism are inherent in Polan’s embrace of New York's sprawling physical terrain and masses of people, who are without fail rendered as distinct individuals by Polan’s hand. Above all, his artistic project suggests freedom of movement and proximity to others, along with the importance of noticing and carefully documenting, while evoking in retrospect our shared loss of spatial innocence.

“[Jason] died before the pandemic,” Sadie Stein noted in her opinion piece for The New York Times in early 2021, “when most of us still had yet to learn that those occasional breaks from urban anonymity, those small moments of connection—wordless, spoken, odd, quotidian—are a tremendous luxury.”

Apart from regularly sharing a table with friend and artist Stefan Marx at Printed Matter’s annual New York Art Book Fair in recent years, Polan did not exhibit widely or have his work shown by major galleries. Among the exceptions were his first-ever solo show, Living and Working, at Chelsea's Nicholas Robinson Gallery in 2011 and an exhibition featuring some of his works at the Parisian retail boutique Colette in 2013. Nevertheless, Polan’s prolific nature and egalitarian approach made him both a well-known and beloved artist, someone who imbued rare warmth and humanity into his art and everyday interactions, which were ultimately inextricable from each other.

With a series of grandly conceived artistic pursuits, Polan showcased his open-armed, maximalist vision. From his I Want to Know All of You project at the University of Michigan, which featured drawn portraits of all 800 people at the art school, to Every Piece of Art in the Museum of Modern Art, in which he reproduced all works on display in 2005 and 2009, to the wryly named An Entire Bag of Popcorn, and, finally, to his Every Person in New York project, begun in 2008, which became Polan’s magnum opus—he had an insatiable urge to render all manner of phenomena. Taken together, Polan’s drawings highlight some of his recurring interests: New Yorkers, city scenes, museums, dinosaurs, comics, pop culture, celebrities, fast food, and, of course, Taco Bell—since Polan famously founded the Taco Bell Drawing Club in 2005 after moving to New York. Yet his body of work went beyond illustration to include printmaking, zines, book design, photography, sculpture, embellished found objects, and more.

As a collector, Polan’s preferences were just as broadly defined. While he favored works by and ephemera related to major figures like Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Richard Prince, Shepard Fairey, and KAWS (Brian Donnelly), he was perhaps even more enamored with compositions by artists who moved in his social circle and those with whom he was close friends. This included Stefan Marx, Masanao (Himaa) Hirayama, Alec Soth, Marcel Dzama, Barry McGee, Jane Mount, Matt Leines, Daniel Davidson, Kathy Ryan, and many others.

Polan was a ubiquitous figure not just on the New York art scene, but on the streets of New York, given his mode of creation. As such, he was finding and acquiring art wherever he went. Quite often, this was at the myriad art and books fairs held throughout the city. In addition to direct purchases, Polan would commonly obtain examples from other artists through trades of his own work. Far from stashing away his collection, he lived surrounded by it at home, his apartment replete with art and books and ephemera that suggested a constant exchange of ideas and influence among his artist friends in New York and beyond. Thus, Polan’s interior space mirrored the glorious abundance of the city outside.

“[Polan’s] was an art of taking pleasure in and appreciating the people, places, and things of the world,” wrote art critic Jerry Saltz in a posthumous tribute for Vulture. “His oeuvre is a mirthful illustrated encyclopedia of modern life, body language, styles, and habits. In addition to his twitchy, wiggling line and ever-curious, recording mind, city life is the deep content of Polan’s work.”

Through his wide-ranging artistic practice and with the diverse collection he so thoughtfully assembled, Jason Polan made manifest his inclusive, humorous, and upbeat outlook on society. His impact on the contemporary art world, and the culture of post-millennial New York City in particular, was profound. While Polan found a larger following through his collaborations with brands like UNIQLO, Nike, Vans, and Marvel Comics in the last five years of his life, never before has the breadth of his art and collection been presented to a broader public market.

Although the world lost Jason Polan too soon, his inimitable style and generosity of spirit form a legacy that continues to grow through the many works he left behind as well as his expansive sense of community, whether applied to his fellow artists or citizens—all of whom he not only saw, but genuinely wanted to know.